BOOKS -of- NON FICTION 2014

 2014 BOOKS  -of-  NON FICTION  (REVIEWS :  NY TIMES)

1	.	AMERICAN MIRROR: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell. By Deborah Solomon. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Solomon pays honest respect to Rockwell for his dedication through periods of self-doubt, depression and marital tumult.
2	.	BEING MORTAL: Medicine and What Matters in the End. By Atul Gawande. (Metropolitan/Holt, $26.) A meditation on living better with age-related frailty, serious illness and approaching death.
3	.	BUILDING A BETTER TEACHER: How Teaching Works (and How to Teach It to Everyone). By Elizabeth Green. (Norton, $27.95.) What emerges here is the gaping chasm between what the best teachers do and how they are evaluated.
4	.	CAN’T WE TALK ABOUT SOMETHING MORE PLEASANT? Written and illustrated by Roz Chast. (Bloomsbury, $28.) This scorchingly honest, achingly wistful graphic memoir looks at the last years of Chast’s nonagenarian parents.
5	.	CHINA’S SECOND CONTINENT: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in ­Africa. By Howard W. French. (Knopf, $27.95.) French delves into the actual lives of the Chinese who have uprooted themselves to live and work in Africa.
6	.	CUBED: A Secret History of the Workplace. By Nikil Saval. (Doubleday, $26.95.) This account of office design and technology since the Civil War offers insights into the changing nature of work.
7	.	DEEP DOWN DARK: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free. By Héctor Tobar. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $26.) Tobar graphically recounts the quandaries faced by the victims of Chile’s 2010 mine disaster.
8	.	DEMON CAMP: A Soldier’s Exorcism. By Jennifer Percy. (Scribner, $26.) Percy’s first book follows an anguished Army veteran who searches for salvation in a Christian exorcism camp.
9	.	DUTY: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. By Robert M. Gates. (Knopf, $35.) One of the few Obama administration members who come off well in this frank account — probably one of the best Washington memoirs ever — is Hillary Clinton.
10	.	DYING EVERY DAY: Seneca at the Court of Nero. By James Romm. (Knopf, $27.95.) A classicist tries to unravel the enigma of the Stoic philosopher who was the Roman emperor Nero’s adviser.
11	.	EICHMANN BEFORE JERUSALEM: The Unexamined Life of a Mass Murderer. By Bettina Stangneth. Translated by Ruth Martin. (Knopf, $35.) The Eichmann of this study is a much more motivated Nazi than in Arendt’s version.
12	.	ELEPHANT COMPANY: The Inspiring Story of an Unlikely Hero and the Animals Who Helped Him Save Lives in World War II. By Vicki Constantine Croke. (Random House, $28.) A rich portrait of a fascinating Englishman in extraordinary times.
13	.	EMBATTLED REBEL: Jefferson Davis as Commander in Chief. By James M. McPherson. (Penguin Press, $32.95.) The Confederate president as “a product of his time and circumstances.”
14	.	THE EMPATHY EXAMS: Essays. By Leslie Jamison. (Graywolf, $15.)Considerations of pain, physical and emotional, and how it affects our relationships with one another and with ourselves.
15	.	FACTORY MAN: How One Furniture Maker Battled Offshoring, Stayed Local — and Helped Save an American Town. By Beth Macy. (Little, Brown, $28.) Macy’s folksy concentration on her local hero makes complex global issues ­understandable.
16	.	THE FAME LUNCHES: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags. By Daphne Merkin. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $28.) Forty-six essays that share a similar curiosity about the glittering byproducts of personal pain.
17	.	FIRE SHUT UP IN MY BONES: A Memoir. By Charles M. Blow. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27.) The Times Op-Ed columnist describes overcoming his rage at being abused as a child.
18	.	FORCING THE SPRING: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality.By Jo Becker. (Penguin Press, $29.95.) A fly-on-the-wall account of the 2013 Supreme Court case that led to the overturn of California’s ban onsame-sex marriage.
19	.	GANDHI BEFORE INDIA. By Ramachandra Guha. (Knopf, $35.) It was as a young lawyer in South Africa that Gandhi forged the philosophy and strategies later put to such effect in India.
20	.	GEEK SUBLIME: The Beauty of Code, the Code of Beauty. By Vikram Chandra. (Graywolf, paper, $16.) With great subtlety and depth, Chandra, who is both a novelist and a programmer, traces the connections between art and technology.
21	.	HOTEL FLORIDA: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War. By Amanda Vaill. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) A collective portrait of Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, and two other couples.
22	.	THE HUMAN AGE: The World Shaped by Us. By Diane Ackerman. (Norton, $27.95.) An optimistic survey of the technology and innovations that define our human-dominated epoch.
23	.	THE INVISIBLE BRIDGE: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan. By Rick Perlstein. (Simon & Schuster, $37.50.) Engrossing and at times mordantly funny, Perlstein’s book treats the years 1973-76 as a Rosetta stone for American politics today.
24	.	THE INVISIBLE FRONT: Love and Loss in an Era of Endless War.By Yochi Dreazen. (Crown, $26.) Dreazen uses one military family’s tragedy to examine the troubling rise of postwar suicides.
25	.	THE INVISIBLE HISTORY OF THE HUMAN RACE: How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures. By Christine Kenneally. ­(Viking, $27.95.) Kenneally takes a smart and highly entertaining look at the revelations DNA can provide.
26	.	JUST MERCY: A Story of Justice and Redemption. By Bryan Stevenson. (Spiegel & Grau, $28.) An activist lawyer’s account of a man wrongfully convicted of murder reads like a call to action.
27	.	LIMONOV. By Emmanuel Carrère. Translated by John Lambert. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.) Carrère applies his affinity for the big questions to his biography of an uncategorizable Russian writer.
28	.	LITTLE FAILURE: A Memoir. By Gary Shteyngart. (Random House, $27.) Shteyngart’s hilarious and touching account of his family’s move from Leningrad to Queens, and his emergence as a writer.
29	.	THE MADWOMAN IN THE VOLVO: My Year of Raging Hormones.By Sandra Tsing Loh. (Norton, $25.95.) Loh’s memoir wittily describes her roller-coaster ride through “the change.”
30	.	NAPOLEON: A Life. By Andrew Roberts. (Viking, $45.) Roberts brilliantly conveys the sheer energy of this military and organizational whirlwind.
31	.	NO GOOD MEN AMONG THE LIVING: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. By Anand Gopal. (Metropolitan/Holt, $27.) A devastating look at how we got ­Afghanistan wrong.
32	.	NOT I: Memoirs of a German Childhood. By Joachim Fest. Translated by Martin Chalmers. (Other Press, paper, $16.95.) The author’s father’s opposition to Hitler brought his family into danger.
33	.	ON IMMUNITY: An Inoculation. By Eula Biss. (Graywolf, $24.)Drawing on science, myth and literature, Biss spellbindingly examines the psychological fog of fear that surrounds immunization today.
34	.	ON THE RUN: Fugitive Life in an American City. By Alice Goffman. (University of Chicago, $25.) A young sociologist’s remarkably reported ethnography of a poor black Philadelphia ­neighborhood.
35	.	100 ESSAYS I DON’T HAVE TIME TO WRITE: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater. By Sarah Ruhl. (Faber & Faber, $23.) The playwright on how to be creative when life and children intervene.
36	.	THE PARTHENON ENIGMA. By Joan Breton Connelly. (Knopf, $35.)With first-rate scholarship, an archaeologist reinterprets the Parthenon frieze in this exciting and revelatory history.
37	.	PAY ANY PRICE: Greed, Power, and Endless War. By James Risen. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28.) The Pulitzer Prize-winning Times reporter chronicles the excesses of the war on terror in this important and powerful book.
38	.	PENELOPE FITZGERALD: A Life. By Hermione Lee. (Knopf, $35.) In this delicate portrait, Lee takes on the challenge of an elusive late-bloomer — the great novelist and biographer who published her first book at 58 and became famous at 80.
39	.	PRO: Reclaiming Abortion Rights. By Katha Pollitt. (Picador, $25.) In this manifesto, Pollitt argues that women should stop apologizing and reclaim abortion as a “positive social good.”
40	.	THE SHORT AND TRAGIC LIFE OF ROBERT PEACE: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League. By Jeff Hobbs. (Scribner, $27.) A heartbreaking journey from a New Jersey ghetto to Yale to a drug-­related murder.
41	.	THE SIXTH EXTINCTION: An Unnatural History. By Elizabeth Kolbert. (Holt, $28.) A powerful examination of the role of man-made climate change in causing the current spasm of plant and animal loss that threatens the planet.
42	.	A SPY AMONG FRIENDS: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal. By Ben Mac­intyre. (Crown, $27.) This account of the high-level British spymaster who turned out to be a Russian mole reads like John le Carré but is a solidly researched true story.
43	.	STUFF MATTERS: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World. By Mark Miodownik. (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $26.) Materials we think banal and boring — paper, concrete, glass, plastic — hold hidden wonders.
44	.	THE TEACHER WARS: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession. By Dana Goldstein. (Doubleday, $26.95.) Goldstein offers a lively, personality-driven survey of the public education system, and offers ideas for its reform.
45	.	THIRTEEN DAYS IN SEPTEMBER: Carter, Begin, and Sadat at Camp David. By Lawrence Wright. (Knopf, $27.95.) How marathon sessions of bare-knuckle diplomacy forged a framework for peace between Israel and Egypt in 1978.
46	.	THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING: Capitalism vs. the Climate. By Naomi Klein. (Simon & Schuster, $30.) In her ambitious and consequential analysis, Klein argues there is still time to avoid catastrophe, but not within the current rules of capitalism.
47	.	THROWN. By Kerry Howley. (Sarabande, paper, $15.95.) With its sly humor and trenchant vision, this genre-bending work finds sublime poetry in the world of mixed martial arts.
48	.	THE TRIP TO ECHO SPRING: On Writers and Drinking. By Olivia Laing. (Picador, $26.) A charming and gusto-driven look at the alcoholic insanity of six famous authors: John Cheever, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Raymond Carver.
49	.	THE TRUE AMERICAN: Murder and Mercy in Texas. By Anand Giridharadas. (Norton, $27.95.) Competing visions of the American dream collide in this account of a post-9/11 hate crime and its unlikely ­reverberations.
50	.	WORLD ORDER. By Henry Kissinger. (Penguin Press, $36.) Kissinger’s elegant, wide-ranging cri de coeur is a realpolitik warning for future generations from a skeptic steeped in the past.